ed yards between himself and
that house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face and
wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over
his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a
hair's breadth some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that was
precisely his feeling,--as if he had been capering madly on the brink
of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to
him in a terrifying flash.

He shivered. His ego grovelled in the dirt. He had often smiled at
theories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen stream
with the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands he
was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk
a duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that,
or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of
isolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.

Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not
been there. But he did not think so now. The brake of his real manhood
had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the
door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a
brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.

Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,
double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor
steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own
ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born
in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early
in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.
And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the
last four years.

Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right
to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such
sophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen
lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious
complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river
bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to
know. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.
Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an
Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had
conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by the
brutal directness of her written avowal